Numerical prediction of temperature effect on propagation of rubbing acoustic emission waves in a thin-walled cylinder structure

Temperature field has serious effects on the accuracy of rubbing acoustic emission (AE) source localization in a thin-walled cylinder structure, but it is difficult to explore the functioning mechanism through experiments. This paper aims to propose a thermos-elastic coupling simulation procedure to reveal the effect of the uniform temperature and non-uniform temperature field on the propagation characteristics of AE waves. To obtain the behaviors of guiding wave in the thin-walled cylinder, an efficient numerical simulation tool for AE wave propagation modeling is explored. The numerical results of AE propagation in a plate are compared with the experimental data. Then the semi-analytical finite element method is introduced to calculate the characteristics of multi-modal and dispersion. To remove the unwanted reflections from boundaries generated by the numerical simulation, a methodology combined with the infinite element and Rayleigh damping is presented. Consequently, several AE wave propagation simulations are carried out respectively, including the model with the uniform temperature in a range of 20-700 degrees C, and the non-uniform temperature field with the temperature of the central region, 649 degrees C. On the basis of the modeling and evaluation results, both the peak-to-peak amplitude and arrival time versus temperatures are summarized and analyzed. The validation results demonstrate that the proposed approach could be used efficiently to research rubbing AE source localization applications with a high degree of accuracy.